Valve's Direct3D to OpenGL Translator (Or Part of It)

Late yesterday night, Valve released source code from their "ToGL" transition layer. This bundle of code sits between "[a] limited subset of Direct3D 9.0c" and OpenGL to translate engines which are designed in the former, into the latter. It was pulled out of the DOTA 2 source tree and published standalone... mostly. Basically, it is completely unsupported and probably will not even build without some other chunks of the Source engine.

Still, Valve did not need to release this code, but they did. How a lot of open-source projects work is that someone dumps a starting blob, and if sufficient, the community pokes and prods it to mold it into a self-sustaining entity. The real question is whether the code that Valve provided is sufficient. As often is the case, time will tell. Either way, this is a good thing that other companies really should embrace: giving out your old code to further the collective. We are just not sure how good.

Source code is a definite improvment over just a binary blob, and maybe the whole open source community can get this working with a newer and more complete full DX9, and DX* translation/"transition" layer for all linux distros, Valve has only so many programmers, but the entire open source programming community should be able to quickly make the lack of DX availability on linux a moot point, for the most part, in not too long a time. Hell, even the gaming companies, themselves, could devote some programming resources, as they would stand to benifit in a low cost/no cost way from having their games playable on linux, with no/almost no porting required. ToGL is definitely a start, and would assist for older titles, while the newer titles/engines can be built around OpenGL from the start.